Re: extend ’guix archive’?

[Christopher Baines]

Jack Hill <jackhill@jackhill.us> writes:

> On Mon, 20 Dec 2021, zimoun wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Mon, 20 Dec 2021 at 23:07, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Regarding nar-herder, I think it’d be nice to have a solution to
>>> mirroring in Guix proper, developed similarly to other components,
>>> because it could be a fairly central tool.
>>>
>>> ‘guix publish’ is probably not extensible enough to support that, but we
>>> could make it a new ‘guix mirror’ or ‘guix sync’ or whatever command.
>>
>> Why not extend “guix archive”?
>
> I'm quite interested in learning more and potentially trying out the
> nar-herder! Some thoughts that I'd like to add to the design space:

Apologies for the slow reply, it's great that you're interested!

> I think it would be great if one of the pastures to which we herd the
> nars would be a free and open source software mirror site. In my
> experience, these are usually some static web hosting in front of a
> large disk with a place to run scripts to sync the content. A database
> server may not be available. I'd like to support this use case because
> I think it is a great way to build bridges to the communities who run
> or gather around these mirrors.

I think there's a general discrepancy between how Guix works and how
mirror sites generally work, but there are probably ways of bridging
that gap. Maybe all the nars for the latest release could be mirrored
for example, and the nar-herder could probably help with that.

> I'd also like the ability fetch nars directly from the local-to-me
> mirror rather than having them be proxied through a far way server.

I think setting up some mirrors closer to the people that use Guix is
now easier to do with the help of the nar-herder.

> One of the things that I really like and find empowering about Guix is
> that the developer/system administration tools are as available, easy
> to use, and convenient as the every day tooling. To the extent
> possible, I think that we should strive to make our syncing/mirroring
> solution practical to run for local, small setups, and not require
> project-scale infrastructure or coordination between many programs
> that are not captured in a Guix service.

Indeed, and this is something to strive for in the design.

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